When Valiant relaunched last year, I was on board from the beginning. I was a huge fan back in the 90′s and they pretty much saved my interest in comics at that time. Everything else was splash pages, fancy covers and hardly any dialog. Valiant had stories…..good stories.
The relaunch has carried that tradition forward and one of my favorite titles this time around has been Bloodshot. I wrote a review after the first few issues because I was reading something pretty special. This title was pulling no punches and the art was great…no, that doesn’t do it justice. Explosive? No….ah, I got it. Visceral. The art was visceral. Yeah, that sound about right.
With Bloodshot #0, we get an origin story of sorts. If you’ve been reading the books, the entire series has been an origin story so I was wondering what they were going to do here. Turns out the story is told from the point of view of the scientist that Project Rising Spirit brings in to solve a problem. You see, the Bloodshot that we know wasn’t the first. They have experimented with several other soldiers with varying levels of success. Once they perfected the nanites, they had a soldier that was nearly invulnerable, at least he could heal himself. What he couldn’t do was decide who lives and who dies. He was an automaton without a soul.
Bloodshot #0 definitely seems like just a fill-in issue. Just a bridge between the events at the end of the Harbinger Wars and the new arc with Bloodshot and the H.A.R.D. Corps. That’s not a bad thing, but what are they going to do here that is different from what the whole story has been about? They promised answers with this issue, but I don’t really feel like I got much. We do see who Bloodshot was before PRS got a hold of him, but the rest of the information was stuff we already knew. No name, no real history of who this man was. We do get to see, in just one quick panel, the Bloodshot from the 70′s and I got to tell you, I want to read that man’s story. Bloodshot with a 70′s attitude and an awesome Fu Manchu mustache? Yes, please!
What this zero issue really does is provide an excellent jumping on point. It gives new readers a pretty good idea of who Bloodshot is before the new arc starts. Fans, like myself, that have been here from the beginning might be a little disappointed with the lack of new information, but it is still a good issue. The art and writing are solid and we still get the amazing Fu Manchu Bloodshot image to talk about, right?